I think it might have been idly browsing through some of the photos that I’ve loaded here, not sure. Maybe it was thinking about buying a digital camera. Whatever, I was randomly musing this afternoon about the effects of digital video and photography on culture, history, myth. Our closeness still to the beginnings of ...

As one of the more radical atheists you’d be likely to find, I probably ought to think the idea of a virtual church is very silly, but the approach taken by Church of Fools strikes me as oddly sweet, in a naive-but-I-hope-it-works way. Technically it seems very nicely put together. I particularly like that, because ...

There are a number of ways in which software, and the process of producing software, can be ethical. There are matters of adherence to software engineering standards. (Ranty aside: Writing software is not engineering. Nor is it architecture. It’s a craft, analogous to very structured prose-writing. The success of a ...

There’s something ineffably sad about the May 11th cast-and-crew photograph on the new blog documenting the filming of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s such a cheery, optimistic scene, and yet the occasion was the third anniversary of Douglas Adams’s sudden death. More than that, ...

Twenty years ago this coming summer, my dad bought me my first computer. It was a BBC Model B, and it couldn’t have been a better place to start with geekery. I’d been messing around for a while with a similar one that my mother would bring home from her school sometimes at weekends for safe keeping. ...

A nice piece by Jacob Weisberg in Slate, which addresses a question that I think will resonate long after there’s no Shrubbery anywhere near the White House: exactly what kind of a fool is Bush? Weisberg and Molly Ivins are two of the people who’ve mused more thoughtfully than most, and both seem to come ...

Van Helsing is a terrible film, but in a particularly modern way. It’s not that it spends all its time at the top of its voice. It’s not that it’s a monster movie in which the monsters aren’t remotely scary. It’s not that the special effects aren’t all that good. It’s not that the ...

Something I wrote a while ago, on the subject of bondage and how it relates to helplessness, which for some reason I was thinking about today. I can’t remember the context in which I wrote this, but it doesn’t matter too much. Bondage isn’t really a centre of gravity for my kink, but it does ...

Driving around LA today with A., apartment hunting, I noticed, not for the first time, a bizarre road-marking protocol that’s used here. It might be common to the entire US, not sure. Either way, it just doesn’t make any sense. A simple example: a sign on the road that says: Here Wait Now, it’s obvious ...

Late as usual, various comings and goings and being-without-TV-ness during the past couple of years meant that I’d not been able to see the entirety of The Office yet, so it’s been great to sit down with the DVDs during the past week and have a bit of a Slough-fest. Much fun was had. And, ...